Now I really smell a rat....
Is the rat you smell inside of DC?
They are very common there.
The ARRL is a lobby group, headquarters is in Newington Connecticut. It can be political, but it that is not supported by the members.
I’ve seen how they operate. Have known some staffers there. When I lived in NM the retired technical editor lived in the same town. W1ICP, Lou McCoy. He retired where I lived in NM. He was an excellent technician, but had a handicap. He lost an eye in a firearms accident. I built a project for him once.
Well - lets learn a little history.
The US hams were shut down completely at the onset of WWI and WWII. In fact we were lucky to get the frequencies back after both! The ARRL (The national ham radio org) was instrumental in both cases.
So did it surprise me that Ukraine shut down amateur operations in time of war - not one bit. As others have mentioned - Radio Direction Finding is EASY - I do it as a hobby and we find the guys every time. Military have BETTER gear than I do by some orders of magnitude!
Then there is the simple matter that we are talking about Short Wave transmissions that can span continents. Doesn’t that sound like the perfect way to communicate with spies? So any amateur radio frequency transmissions within my country during a time of war would be a spy - because we’ve ordered all of our patriotic types off the air for the duration. Seems a practical state security matter to me.
73s de Steve KA6S